Shipping pallets are conventionally made of scrap lumber, fibreboard, etc. by nailing or otherwise fastening pieces of such material together. After a pallet has served its shipping purpose it is normally discarded, unless it can be reused to transport a new shipment from the point at which the original shipment was received. Empty pallets are not normally transported for use elsewhere because the cost of transporting relatively bulky pallets often exceeds their value. It is impractical to disassemble a pallet and transport the relatively compact pallet pieces for reassembly of the pallet elsewhere, because disassembly often damages or destroys the pieces and because the cost of disassembling and reassembling conventional pallets is high compared to their value.
The prior art has accordingly evolved a variety of reusable pallet structures. These typically take the form of a series of stubby legs which are used to interconnect sheets of pallet material at several points to form a pallet. The legs are normally made of plastic or similar tough, impact resistant material. The pallet is formed by releasably attaching the legs to the pallet sheets at pre-drilled apertures provided in the sheets. After the pallet has served its purpose (i.e. after the pallet has been used to ship goods from a source to a destination) the legs can be removed in order to disassemble the pallet. The legs, which are typically formed so that they can be compactly nested together, may then be transported to another shipping point where they can be reused to construct additional pallets. The sheet material may or may not be returned with the pallet legs. In either case, pallets can be quickly, repeatedly assembled and disassembled without damaging the legs or the pallet sheet material. The disassembled legs and/or sheets can be transported more economically than empty pallets since the disassembled materials occupy much less storage space than pallets.
The present invention provides an improved pallet leg.